I'm planning to write a series of posts about the tools that get stuck with me. I try a lot of different tools and always strive to perfect my working environment, after all, I spend 40+ hours a week in front of the machine, so it better be productive.
I'm not a developer; I'm a user, and I run several websites for my businesses and need staging/development versions of the sites. I use a methodology that works out something like:
Live-site gets duplicated (with updraft plus plugin that I use for backup) to a separate account. That website is set up to answer to the same domain as the live-site which makes it unavailable for the masses.
Anyone that needs to work on the site will den use Gasmask (http://clockwise.ee/) to temporarily change the hosts file on their computer to point to the IP-address of the dev site. This can, of course, be achieved in a lot of ways - but Gasmask gives me quite a few advantages:
I have a menu on the top on my Mac, stating which file is in use, with real quick changing.
In the menu, I can keep numerous versions of Hosts files available directly for changing
Gasmask sports a nice editor for editing host files.
Try it out - it makes host files quick and easy to handle and working with Wordpress is nicer without changing hostnames on the dev-sites!